WHAT I’M WATCHING: Till: Based on the True Story Mamie Till became an educator and activist in the Civil Rights Movement after the death of her 14-year-old son, Emmett, who, in 1955, was beaten severely and shot dead for allegedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, while visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi.” Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half brother J. W. Milam tied a 75 pound cotton gin fan around Till’s neck with barbed wire and threw him into the Tallahatchie River.
 Bryant and Milam were tried for the murder and quickly acquitted by an all-white jury. They later confessed in a January 1956 Look magazine interview for which they were paid $4,000. Carolyn Bryant is still alive and has never been charged. Because of Mamie Till’s bravery, her son’s body appeared in an open casket so, as she said, “the world can see what they did to my boy.” Photographs appeared in Jet magazine. Today his casket is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. A traveling exhibit about Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley opened at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in September 2022.